Scientiffic consensus.

[Vldmr]

Hello! I sometimes debate my friends on different topics that involve history, geology, biology, cosmology e.t.c. So i have a question:

Where i can quickly get information about scientific consensus on different topics?

Like age of the Earth, for example. Or history of the institution of marriage. Or history of Christmas. Something that would involve links to peer-reviewed articles and a sets of scientific facts. Wikipedia doesn't really work, because it's articles rarely include links to peer-reviewed sources and can be biased. How not to fall for things like "holocaust didn't happen" or "earthis 6000 years old"?

 

I don't want to make mistake of believing that this is what scientific majority believes after seeing first pages of Google filled with titles like this.

 

Edited January 2, 2012 by Vldmr

[ajb]

Wikipedia doesn't really work, because it's articles rarely include links to peer-reviewed sources and can be biased.

 

Wikipedia usually has references that are either review papers or the original papers, for scientific things anyway. For non-scientific things, like history I would not know what the standard of referencing is.

[iNow]

I am not aware of any one resource that addresses all of them in a scientific manner. Most would be specific to the topic.

 

For instance, on the age of the earth you can look here: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-age-of-earth.html

On the history of marriage, maybe here (search for the term "marriage" throughout): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_LGBT_history

On the holocaust, perhaps here: http://www.nizkor.org/

 

 

Ultimately, though... It sounds like you are arguing with people who have ideological beliefs which were not themselves created using evidence or reason. In this case, it's often rather difficult to change their minds using evidence and reason since neither is what informed their current opinion. Good luck.

[swansont]

For science subjects, if it's in a widely-used textbook it probably is part of the consensus. Beware self/vanity-house published books, though.

[mississippichem]

For science subjects, if it's in a widely-used textbook it probably is part of the consensus. Beware self/vanity-house published books, though.

 

And beware of badly written popularizations. They can be fun and accessible but can also be misleading and were not intended to be authoritative sources.

Edited January 2, 2012 by mississippichem

[Vldmr]

Ultimately, though... It sounds like you are arguing with people who have ideological beliefs which were not themselves created using evidence or reason. In this case, it's often rather difficult to change their minds using evidence and reason since neither is what informed their current opinion. Good luck.

 

That is true. You can not change minds of "people who have ideological beliefs". However, those people spread "crap" among ordinary people. And pople beilive this "crap" mostly because there is no reasonable alternative to it and they do not have time and/or qualification to go through tons of scientific literature to get the full unbiased picture. So, may be if we only we could give them a reliable source things would be better... And, by just showing how this source works we can convince people that they can trust it.

[ajb]

And beware of badly written popularizations. They can be fun and accessible but can also be misleading and were not intended to be authoritative sources.

 

Even good popularisations can only go so far. Reading "A Brief History of Time" does not make you a theoretical physicist! You can quote me on that one

[Vldmr]

For science subjects, if it's in a widely-used textbook it probably is part of the consensus. Beware self/vanity-house published books, though.

 

The problem is we have a lot of bad textbooks in Russia, especially books that involve historical events. History books were rewritten several times,

before the communism, during it and after. We have a saying "Russia is a country with unpredictable past".

You rarely can track a source of information about some historical event, one book references another in distorted way and so on, like a broken phone.

Myths go from one book to another with no ability to track down set of facts from witch historical claim has been made.

[kitkat]

The problem is we have a lot of bad textbooks in Russia, especially books that involve historical events. History books were rewritten several times,

before the communism, during it and after. We have a saying "Russia is a country with unpredictable past".

You rarely can track a source of information about some historical event, one book references another in distorted way and so on, like a broken phone.

Myths go from one book to another with no ability to track down set of facts from witch historical claim has been made.

 

 

This problem is not only in Russia but global in textbooks that were rewritten during a different time frame. Take two countries at war with each other, each country is going to describe the war with their own cultural beliefs mixed in with their version of the truth. You can't declare anything that you read to be 100% factual from its source. In science, old beliefs of evidence are replaced with modern interpretation of the evidence in that time in that time frame. Information is subject to evolution just like any other that we call evolution. Its content can change with time even the religious text throughout history.

[swansont]

The problem is we have a lot of bad textbooks in Russia, especially books that involve historical events. History books were rewritten several times,

before the communism, during it and after. We have a saying "Russia is a country with unpredictable past".

You rarely can track a source of information about some historical event, one book references another in distorted way and so on, like a broken phone.

Myths go from one book to another with no ability to track down set of facts from witch historical claim has been made.

 

That's why I specified science subjects. History is dicier in terms of consensus.